ESN Premium discusses “long-term value creation” for infrastructure investors, with Daniel Burrows of BESS developer Eku Energy.
It has always been an overarching aim of clean energy industries to bring long-term investors into the sector. For example, the arrival of pension funds into solar PV and wind about ten years ago, encouraged by feed-in tariffs and long-term power purchase agreements (PPAs) with fixed components, helped those sectors scale into a global investment proposition.
The energy storage sector is a little more complex in that the underlying opportunities in electricity markets are largely based on short-term volatility that enables ancillary market and wholesale arbitrage revenues. Opportunities predicated on merchant revenue streams remain attractive to investors with a higher risk appetite for high returns, but for energy storage to scale in the same way we saw renewables do in the past likely means bringing in more risk-averse patient capital.
Eku Energy, incubated in Macquarie Asset Management’s Green Investment Group, has developed 10 projects totalling 2.9GWh and counting, since its launch in 2022. It is now co-owned by Macquarie and British Columbia Investment Management Corporation (BCI).
